16. Ashes, Answers and Emma-Lou
Ashes, Answers and Emma-Lou
By the time the sun hauled itself over the Land O’ Lakes horizon, Greater Napanee had already decided Emma-Lou Burns was dead.
People were subtle about it, in the way small-town people are subtle: casseroles left anonymously on her porch, with names and numbers written in marker on masking tape at the bottom of the dish for safe return and ensured recognition of a good deed, murmured poor dear’s in the Bulk Barn aisles, church ladies praying for all the lost sheep while staring indelicately at her usual pew, now empty.
The burned-out skeleton of WWJD stood like a tombstone at the edge of town, and in the way any reasonable whodunnit should remain unsolved to the fury of its reader/listener, the heiress to the airwaves was meant to vanish with it.
The story could then be resurrected as a true crime podcast or a limited run TV series to a new generation who could become equally enraged at the audacity of a producer to tell a story with no conclusive ending.
That is not this story. You will leave satiated from a tale of two tyrants and the pluck with which they pillaged and plundered to their own peril.
Odds laid and lots drawn? Wisdom! Let us be attentive and begin.
Instead of vanishing, on a cool gold morning that smelled like wet pavement and percolated coffee, she walked right back into town singing.
Emma-Lou wore black as it was de rigueur for her day’s destination but the à la mode way in which she’d assembled it turned heads in a small town like Napanee.
Or maybe it was that she was singing. Or maybe it was that she was, in fact, alive.
She wore a sensible black pencil skirt that had seen every church potluck for a decade; thick black tights with one invisible run only she knew about; a black blouse with oversized puffy sleeves and tiny pearl buttons her mother had sewn on herself; a large black hat topped with a three-masted and rigged ghost ship swirling in a sea of black lace; a partial veil studded with onyx fluttering over one eye.
To ward off the morning chill, she’d thrown a long black trench coat that made her look, depending on the angle, like either a detective or a ghoul in a community theatre production of A Christmas Carol.
Her blond hair, usually teased into a radio-appropriate bouffant, was in a long braid that she’d wrapped like a noose around her throat.
Whether this was because she’d forgotten a scarf or if it was a subconscious manifestation of something more sinister, we’ll just have to wait to see.
She’d scraped on lipstick from the bottom of the tube in the bathroom mirror that morning, and it listed sadly starboard, but it may have been an illusion given the way the sail-less ship atop her head trembled and swayed as she fearlessly faced the town.
Her boots were dusty. Her eyes were wet.
She came in from the highway, where the Tim Hortons gave way to modest brick homes and the occasional ambitious bungalow, and she began to sing before she realized she was doing it. It started as a hum, then a phrase, and then the words unspooled from somewhere between her diaphragm and her grief.
“Who keeps a lantern lit,” she sang softly, “when the ones who taught her how… are swallowed by a story that the town believes for now?”
She passed Mrs. Hilderman, who was sweeping her driveway in a housecoat and curlers. The broom froze mid-sweep as the older woman breathed in disbelief, “Emma-Lou?”
Emma-Lou lifted two fingers in a trembling little salute, kept walking, and kept singing, “Who trades in all her secrets for a single honest day? Who decides she’d rather build a bridge than burn it all away?”
She walked by the Credit Union of Christ (which had recently rebranded to CUC Financial after several letters from the federal regulator). The automatic doors wheezed, and the manager stood there with a coffee, blinking like she’d seen a ghost.
“Morning Erin,” Emma-Lou called, her voice catching, then strengthening. “I’d like to close out the WWJD accounts today.”
“No more donations?” She stared at Emma-Lou as if considering whether to start the transaction or call the priest for an exorcism.
“No more drama, I’m done,” Emma-Lou said simply.
As Emma-Lou exited CUC Financial, the town stirred around her.
A dog swimming in an Easter Egg sweater barked irritably and understandably.
Someone honked hello. Teens in hoodies paused outside the video rental place, their Walkmans dangling, watching the strange funeral procession of one.
As she passed the bakery, warm sugar and yeast gusted out at her, mixing with the charred phantom smell of smoke that lived permanently now somewhere in her chest. She reached the stretch of sidewalk parallel with the ruins of WWJD and stopped walking.
The building had once been charming in an outdated way, a two-storey brick shoebox with a teal awning that read WWJD 96.
5 What Would Jesus Do?. Now what remained of the awning drooped and was melted into ribbons.
The chalked Bible verses that Carrington used to write on the sandwich board out front had been scorched into illegible smudges.
The windows were punched out, jagged teeth of glass framing darkness within.
The roof was gone. The interior was a blackened, collapsed throat.
She could see the lobby desk, or what was left of it; Carrington’s receptionist chair, half-melted into something that looked like modern art; the twisted ruin of the fax machine that had once spit out lawyer’s letters and baking sale announcements in equal measure toward the end.
There, in the centre of it all, stood her people.
They looked, Emma-Lou thought, like the cast of a very queer reboot of Scooby-Doo, standing in a tight circle in a haunted radio station.
Her song caught in her throat. For a moment they all just stared at each other, the silence between them thick with questions and wonder. Then Rebekkah shrieked.
“Emma-Lou?!” she cried, and the name cracked like adolescence on the hyphenation.
“Sweet Mother Mary on marmalade toast,” Ronald breathed. “You’re alive.”
“Of course she’s technically still alive,” Suwarna said faintly, clutching her clipboard like a life raft, though she too looked a little rattled. “I never signed off on her death certificate. You’re welcome.”
“E-L!” Carrington yelled, and then they were all moving at once.
They hit her like a wave. Arms around shoulders, around waist, around neck; somebody’s hair in her mouth, somebody’s perfume in her nostrils, somebody’s cowboy boot on her toe.
It didn’t matter. For a moment, she was submerged in the human heart, and it felt like the first breath after being held under too long.
“You’re crushing my bangs,” she managed, face mashed against Suwarna’s shoulder padded blazer.
“Your fringe is indestructible,” Carrington said, voice thick. “Unlike my heart. You disappeared! I almost wrote a country ballad.”
“I thought you were raptured,” Rebekkah sobbed, mascara beginning to water paint her face into a raccoon. “And that I was left behind. Again.”
“I knew she wasn’t raptured,” Ronald said. “No shade, boss, but if anyone was gonna get beamed up first, it’d be Suwarna. She has pre-packed luggage.”
“True,” Suwarna admitted. “Flashlight with extra batteries, passports, three changes of underwear, laminated copy of my performance reviews, a list of questions about the God Particle. But this isn’t about me.”
Emma-Lou laughed, a raw, unexpected sound, and her knees nearly gave out from the relief of it. She pulled back enough to look at them all properly, “I’m so sorry. I am so, so sorry I left. I… I thought if I stayed, I’d make it worse.”
Rebekkah stepped back, hands on hips, tragedy and fury and joy all jostling for space on her face. “You think vanishing into thin air didn’t make it worse? Where were you?”
Emma-Lou flinched, then squared her shoulders. “That’s why I’m here. I have to tell you everything. All of it. No more lies. No more… laundering the truth.”
The last word came out like a cough.
“Are you…” Japheth’s voice wobbled. “Are you really back? You’re not a dream? Because I had a dream last night where Jesus showed up in a rainbow tracksuit and explained gay sex to me, and I’m still trying to work all of that out. Are you real? Is this reality?”
“I’m really back,” she said. “And you deserve the truth.”
Suwarna cleared her throat, eyes narrowing in a way that meant her inner Vice President of Compliance had slid into the driver’s seat. “Then let’s sit. No one should confess standing up. Although it’s better for your blood pressure. But let’s be comfortable in the uncomfortable conclusion.”
They picked their way carefully over the threshold of the ruined station, into the lobby.
The smell of smoke still clung to everything; under it, the faint ghost of burnt coffee and old potpourri sachets.
The once-shiny, exploded Teletubby white tiles were cracked and soot-streaked, and the potted Ficus in the corner had been reduced to a blackened stick.
The reception desk, scorched but stubbornly upright, became their confessional.
Emma-Lou perched on the edge, hands clasped between her knees.
The Gregorian hold music, once endlessly looping from the ceiling speakers, was mercifully silent now.
In its place, there was only the distant hiss of the wind moving through the skeletal building, like a congregation whispering in wonderment.
“Okay, here goes,” Emma-Lou said, taking off her hat, realizing the time for all distractions was over. “My parents were not just the sweet Christian radio couple everyone thought they were.”
“Well, we figured,” Carrington said gently. “Your mamma wore leather pants that one time. No one that hot is completely pure.”
“No,” Emma-Lou said, and a ghost of a smile flickered before it extinguished. “They loved Jesus. They loved this town. They also… laundered money.”